Cash Assistance for Children: ‘States Are The Ballgame Now’

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore on Tuesday said that policies enacted by the Trump administration have made the role of state governments even more central in combating child poverty, particularly with cash assistance such as expanded Child Tax Credits.

“States are the ballgame right now,” Moore, a Democrat, said in a conversation with MSNBC anchor Catherine Rampell at a conference on cash assistance for children hosted by the Urban Institute. “All the innovation is taking place at the state level, because the state is really the place where you can show not just efficacy, but scale. Because if a state can accomplish it, and you’re then watching how other states are picking it up, that’s how things can actually become a part of a larger national conversation.”

Moore’s comments came at the multi-panel conference, Cash Assistance for Children: Research Roundup and Policy Future, hosted by the Urban Institute in collaboration with the Berkeley Opportunity Lab at the University of California Berkeley. The event followed up on insights from the 2023 convening and 2024 convening and serve as a capstone to the multi-year Innovations in Cash Assistance for Children Initiative, a research and policy initiative aimed at delivering new evidence on how best to promote economic security for families with children.

Urban President Sarah Rosen Wartell said the cash assistance project began at a point when many hoped the 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit would lead to a longer-term federal intervention on child poverty. Instead, the expanded CTC was allowed to expire by Congress and that turning point, Wartell said, “was not to be . . . we still have insufficient trust to begin a serious conversation about reimagining a safety net that would work effectively to expand opportunities for poor children.”

The conference looked at the current state of research on cash assistance for children and families as well as what is happening at the state level.

Moore, who has made child poverty alleviation a major focus of his administration with legislation such as the ENOUGH Act, was joined in the afternoon’s conversation by Tracy Gruber, executive director of the Utah Department of Health and  Human Services.

Under the leadership of Gruber and Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, Utah has seen its child poverty rate nearly cut in half over the past ten years, with a particular focus on policies that target inter-generational poverty.

“This is an incredibly important conversation when we look at how much money is being spent on safety net programs—$114 trillion is the number that I saw recently for 114 programs—and we owe it to our families to know whether or not those investments are producing results,” Gruber said.

“Utah focuses on opportunities from the start, really driving local solutions, providing the tools to success, not just the financial support, and in recognizing that it is not the sole responsibility of government to be able to ensure that there are opportunities.”

A panel moderated by Hilary Hoynes, the Chancellor’s professor of Economics and Public Policy at University of California Berkeley and the faculty director of the Berkeley Opportunity Lab, addressed the latest research on cash assistance. Several recent studies, including one from the Baby’s First Years project, have found only marginal benefits.

Jacob Bastian, assistant professor of Economics at Rutgers University and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, said some of the latest data came from programs launched during the COVID pandemic, when there were numerous other government aid programs, and had relatively small sample sizes. Recent U.S. studies also come after numerous, positive analyzes in peer countries abroad, many of which have had child benefit programs for decades.

“Big picture, we know from lots of countries around the world with big sample sizes that these policies do a lot of good things,” Bastian said.

“We’ve learned something here, and we need to keep learning,” said Hoynes “I don’t think it shuts things down. I don’t think it negates the evidence we have that there are documented long-term findings.”

Gruber said her advice for other states from her experience in Utah is to try to remove silos at the state level; define outcomes, not outputs; and integrate data so policy makers truly know what’s going on with constituents and aren’t making assumptions.

Moore said reducing child poverty was a major motivation for his decision to seek office for the first time.

“I don’t know how a society can call itself humane when it allows child poverty,” Moore said. He said that when considering running for governor he “knew that if you did not have a state government and a governor’s office that didn’t just have the intention but had the absolute, maniacal obsession to deal with this, then we were just going to continue cleaning up the debris that comes from broken policies.”

Sam Gill, president and CEO of the Doris Duke Foundation, said the conference, with its focus on data-informed policy making, underscored the need to prioritize and support “a system of democratic governance that insists that social policy should, in the first instance, be based on scholarly and scientific study.

“Right now, the legitimacy and basic integrity of that system is struggling to secure its existence,” Gill said. “The outcome of this debate will determine whether reason and expertise will continue to be the basis of how we govern a democracy in the modern age.”